How to Make the Church Redundant

A Paradigm Shift or a Program for Decline?

Clifford Longley has written a long article for The Tablet in which he asks that the new Archbishop of Westminster, Richard Moth, instigates a complete change of direction for the Church in England and Wales. Longley presents his proposal as a bold “paradigm shift for English Catholicism,” yet what he sketches is not a new horizon but the well-worn trajectory that the Church in England and Wales has been following for the better part of sixty years: That is, a steady recalibration from supernatural proclamation to mushy sociological irrelevance, a move from the altar to the conference platform, a direction change from the salvation of souls to the management of public virtue. And Lord help me is it boring!

We are told, once again, that the Church must justify herself by visible utility, by alignment with secular campaigns and by becoming an agent of social justice in language almost indistinguishable from that of the surrounding culture. But is this actually a shift? It seems to me that this is the very experiment that has coincided with emptied seminaries, doctrinal illiteracy, and generations of young people who were offered activism in place of transcendence and, predictably, chose neither. It is the narrative of justification from men who have lost their supernatural faith. It is an attempt to secure purpose through immanent utility after the transcendent end for which the Church exists has been muted or displaced. When the Church ceases to speak first and last of Christ Jesus, crucified and risen, she does not become more compelling. She becomes redundant. And when Christ is displaced from the centre, another cause will always rush in to occupy the vacuum, whether social reform, ecological alarmism (thankfully, Longley spared us this ‘paradigm’), or the latest moral consensus of the age. A Church that forgets her Head must invent a mission. A Church that remembers Him does not need one.